Many thinkers have maintained that even after we learn all about how our brain-functions work, one basic question may always remain: “Why do we experience” things?” Here is one philosopher who has argued explaining ‘subjective experience’ could be the hardest problem of psychology—and possibly one that no one will ever solve.
David Chalmers: “Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? … Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? ... The emergence of experience goes beyond what can be derived from physical theory.”[73]
It appears to me that Chalmers assumes that experiencing is quite plain and direct—and therefore deserves some sort of simple, compact explanation. However, once we recognize that each of our everyday psychology words (like experience, feeling, and consciousness) refers to a suitcase of different phenomena, then we should no longer expect to find and single way to explain all the contents of that suitcase-word. Instead, we first will need to make theories about each of those different phenomena. Then we may be able to see that some subsets of them share some useful similarities. But until we have made the right kinds of dissections, it would be rash to conclude that what they describe cannot be ‘derived’ from other ideas. [See §§Emergence.]
Physicist: Perhaps brains exploit some unknown laws that cannot be built into machinery. For example, we don’t really know how gravity works—so consciousness might be an aspect of that.[74]
This too assumes what it’s trying to prove—that there must be a single source or cause for all the marvels of ‘consciousness’. But as we saw in §4-2, consciousness has more meanings than can be explained in any single or uniform way.
Essentialist: What about the basic fact that consciousness makes me aware of myself? It tells me what I am thinking about, and this is how I know I exist. Computers compute without any such sense, but whenever a person feels or thinks, this come with that sense of ‘experience’—and nothing else is more basic than this.
Chapter §9 will argue that it is a mistake to suppose that you are ‘aware of yourself’—except in a very coarse everyday sense. Instead, you are constantly switching among different ‘self-models’ that you have composed—and each of these is based on different, incomplete set of incomplete evidence. “Experience” may seem quite clear and direct—but frequently it’s just plain incorrect, because each of your various views of yourself may be partly based on oversights, or other varieties of mistakes.
Whenever you look at somebody else, you can see their appearance, but not what’s inside it. It’s the same when you look at yourself in a mirror; you only see what lies outside of your skin. Now, in the popular view of consciousness, you also possess some magical trick with which you can look at yourself from inside, and thus see directly into your own mind. But when you reflect on this more carefully you’ll see that your ‘privileged access’ to your own thoughts may sometimes be less accurate than are the ‘insights’ of your intimate friends. (See §9-X.)
Citizen: That claim is so ridiculous that it makes me annoyed with what you said—and I know this in some special way that directly from inside myself, to tell me exactly what I think.
Your friends, too, can see that you are disturbed—and your consciousness fails to tell you details about why those words made you feel annoyed, or to shake your head that particular way, what caused you to use those particular words to say annoyed instead of disturbed? True, we can’t see much of a person’s thoughts by observing their actions from outside—but even when we ‘watch from inside,’ it is hard to be sure that we really see more, in view of how often such ‘insights’ are wrong. So, if we take ‘consciousness’ to mean ‘aware of our internal processes’—it doesn’t live up to its reputation.
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
—H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu” §4-9. A-Brains and B-Brains
---Socrates: Imagine men living in an underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light—but the men have been chained from their childhood so that they never can turn their heads around and can only look toward the back of the cave. Far behind them, outside the cave, a fire is blazing, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a low wall built along the way, like the screen, which puppeteers have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.
---Glaucon: I see.
---Socrates: And do you see men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood, stone, and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent.
---Glaucon: You have shown me a strange image …
---Socrates: Like us, they see nothing but only the shadows of themselves and of those other objects, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave… Then in every way such prisoners would deem reality to be nothing else than those shadows...
—Plato, in The Republic Can you think about what you are thinking right now? Well, in a literal sense, that’s impossible—that each such thought would change what you’re thinking now. However, you can settle for something slightly less—if you imagine that your brain (or mind) is composed of two principal parts: Let’s call these your A-brain and B-Brain.
Now suppose that your A-Brain gets signals that stream from such organs as eyes, ears, nose, and skin; then it can use those signals to discern some events that occur in the external world—and then it can react to these, by sending signals that make your muscles move—which in turn can affect the state of the world. By itself, it’s a separate animal.
However, your B-Brain has no such external sensors, but only gets signals that come from A. So B cannot ‘see’ any actual things; it can only see A’s descriptions of them. Like a prisoner in Plato’s cave, who sees only
